This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Militant Organization gathers four Salafi jihadist militant networks, three of them tied to one another through documented splits rather than existing as separate movements from the start.
Al-Qaeda, founded in 1988 by Osama bin Laden and associates from the anti-Soviet Afghan mobilization, carried out the 11 September 2001 attacks and numerous others worldwide. Its Iraqi affiliate evolved through several name changes into what declared itself a caliphate as Islamic State in 2014, after which the two organizations split and became rivals, each claiming the other has departed from correct doctrine and strategy. The rejection of Islamic State's caliphate claim reached well beyond its former parent: more than a hundred Muslim scholars set out a point by point rejection in an open letter that same year, and a United Nations inquiry found its 2014 campaign against the Yazidis of Sinjar constituted genocide.
Boko Haram, founded in 2002 in northeastern Nigeria by the preacher Mohammed Yusuf around a founding rejection of secular schooling, itself split after a 2015 pledge of allegiance to Islamic State, dividing into a loyalist faction operating as Islamic State West Africa Province and a rump faction that remained under Abubakar Shekau until his 2021 death.
Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan stands apart from that chain of splits, an umbrella of Pakistan based factions formed in 2007, distinct from but allied with the Afghan Taliban, whose constituent networks have attacked religious minorities within Pakistan including the Ahmadiyya community.
What unites the four is shared Salafi jihadist doctrine and, for three of them, a genealogy of splits each side reads as the other's departure from it.